his reply. This is the more probable, as one bystander whispers to another, that he believes Phil. Bird’s is the worst house in the street, a remark which seems to excite the cordial approbation of the party to whom it is addressed—a remark also which the superintendent hears, and which leads him to cry “silence” in his loudest voice and sternest manner. The whisperer is cowed at once.
Phil. Bird looks gratefully at the superintendent; the latter is grateful in O’Connell’s sense, and has a lively sense of favours to come.
“And the woman, what about her?” asks the magistrate.
“I believe generally she’s very well behaved,” says policeman Brown, as if on the present occasion she had been guilty of an enormous offence.
“Do you know anything against her?”
“Not as I know of, yer worship.”
“Well,” says the magistrate, addressing the poor washerwoman, nervous and “all of a tremble,” as she afterwards confidentially informs a friend, looking as if she expected immediate sentence of death passed upon her, “what do you say to the charge? Mr Bird says you went and
created a disturbance in his shop; now you had no business to do that, you know.”
“I know I hadn’t, sir,” said the poor woman; but here she burst into tears.
Had she been alone with the magistrate, who is a kind-hearted man, and wishes to do what is right, she would soon have found her tongue, and her warm appeal, told with natural eloquence, because told out of a full heart, would soon have reached his own; but she is frightened—her energies are paralysed,—she cannot speak at all.